France on Wednesday was working to calm mounting passions between Paris and Algiers over the killing of many thousands of Algerians 60 years ago by French colonial troops, but stopped short of offering a gesture sought by Algiers "to erase this black stain."
A ranking French Foreign Ministry official said that the truth should be left to historians.
For decades, bitterness over the May 8, 1945, attack on Algerians in the eastern town of Setif has seethed under the skin of this North African nation.
Passions erupted last weekend when Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika denounced the killings and compared French methods in the "massacres" to those used by Nazi Germany.
He asked France to make a "gesture ... to erase this black stain."
"The day that the truth is established by historians, we can qualify the facts," French Foreign Ministry secretary of state Renaud Muselier told reporters here.
"But we must move forward with cooperation between the two countries," he said.
Thousands of people were killed as French colonial troops put down an uprising in Setif that began with the unfurling of an Algerian flag at a demonstration that was celebrating the World War II victory.
Flags were confiscated, crowds turned on the French, killing about two dozen of them.
The uprising gathered steam, spreading through the region.
Algerians say some 45,000 people may have died. Figures in France put the number of Algerian dead at about 15,000 to 20,000. However, no one is quite sure of the toll.
`Commandos of death'
The Algerian president, in a lengthy speech delivered on Saturday, denounced the troops as "commandos of death."
He decried what he said were "ovens of shame" where French allegedly burned the dead.
"These ovens were identical to the crematory ovens of the Nazis," Bouteflika said.
Muselier, visiting Algiers since Monday, said French officials "read with great attention" the speech.
"Each of the two sides has its view of these events," Muselier told reporters.
"For Algerians, it was a war of colonization and for the French it was a war," he said.
That statement had a special resonance because of France's personal struggle to come to grips with its colonial past in Algeria, and the loss of the North African colony in 1962 after a brutal, seven-year war.
Acknowledgement
Only in recent years has France acknowledged that the fighting was a war.
Paris and Algiers have been making a special push to improve ties, and France reaffirmed on Tuesday that it wants to conclude a friendship treaty with Algeria by year's end.
In Paris, Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said that both sides must "examine and overcome the past, including the most painful pages of the colonial period and the war of Algeria."
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